Britney Pregnancy Update

I write this post -- especially with its headline and photo -- as a little bit of an experiment. To the best of my knowledge, just about everyone claims to disdain Britney Spears and, moreover, expresses zero interest in what she's up to. What's more, they resent that the media spend so much time reporting all-Britney all the time.

And yet ... and yet ... we in the media know what sells. We know that a front page with a picture of Brit will sell far more copies than one with a pic of Ehud Olmert. We know that posts with titles like "Britney Pregnancy Update" will generate far more Web traffic than, oh, "A Plan for Health Care Reform."

So even though, like everyone else, I have no interest in Britney, I can't help writing about her. And you, who could have stopped reading this post several sentences ago, can't help but paying attention. You don't want to care about Britney Spears, but for some reason you do.

That's not all bad.

For better or -- I would argue, for much, much -- worse, Britney Spears is a national icon. She represents a great swath of modern American culture: our fascinations with wealth, celebrity, sex, and gossip. Writing about Britney is, thus, a shorthand way of writing about a significant component of modern American life. What she does, and how we react, tells us a lot about who we are.

Which brings us to the latest Britney news. In Touch magazine reports that she is pregnant, again, via a new boyfriend. According to this report, the father has confirmed the story. But elsewhere, a Brit confidant denies it.

Meanwhile, for all our prurient fascination, there may or may not be another baby entering the world who, through no fault of his or her own, will live a life embroiled in this sordid soap opera's dysfunctionality. That makes three such children, the central players in this real-life saga, who are little more than props in the greater theatrics.

That's the downside of all-Britney all the time: This isn't merely frivolity; there are real victims. And in a society that's obsessed with wealth, celebrity, sex and gossip, children -- who can offer none of these things -- tend to be overlooked, under-appreciated and forgotten.